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Post by Thorn on May 13, 2019 21:48:05 GMT -5
Me to my brother, as we settle in to paint goblins: "Hey! My friends all tell me it's Super Important to thin your paints! How much water do you think I need?" Him: "I...don't do that." What a start! I opted to thin them, but the brushes are pretty old and the really fine one has bristles sticking out all over the place. So there are a few random blotches, but I still made some progress! And even though I just have Bad Camera Pics, I wanted to share! 1. The most completed of the goblins! Ft. red hair so they will stand out from the rest of my brother's hoard and when they are set against me, I'll always know which one was the First Mini I Painted. <3 Because I've never painted miniatures before, but I've been so looking forward to learning. 2. With their buddies! Best goblin friends 5eva! One of the biggest issues for me is that my hands always tremble (I don't notice it normally, only when I need to make Very Tiny Steady movements like this.) Which is frustrating and means I need to paint low to the table, as even when I plant my elbows and hold the minis up it's too tricky for small details. But oh well!
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Post by M is for Morphine on May 14, 2019 12:08:35 GMT -5
The "Nolzur's Marvelous Minis" goblins are just... unspeakably small. I think it's impressive that you're doing such a nice job on you first mini, especially those tiny buggers. A little steadying trick that works for me- in addition to having your elbows on the table, you can stick out the pinky on your brush hand and rest it on the hand that holds the mini. A little awkward but it cuts down on the shaking a bit.
I love seeing people get in to minis because I find it so relaxing. I hope you keep having fun as well.
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Post by Thorn on May 14, 2019 14:50:15 GMT -5
Thanks so much for the tip! And for the nice comments- I loved looking at all the pretties in your thread, and I know you've been painting for ages, so that makes it Extra Nice.
Anyway, I hope to do a bit more painting today, so I will try the pinky thing and let you know how it goes! :-D
The goblins are, indeed, unspeakably tiny. xD I get it- they need to be about half the size of the human minis- but it does mean that me with precisely zero experience got frustrated by my inability to paint the teeny tiny details. But I've heard from others that painting is relaxing, yeah, and hopefully after a bit of practice it'll be like that for me too!
My brother has a neglected drider mini I'll ask to work on next. They're one of my fave monsters, it's a good size, the colour scheme will be easy, and he's already told me he's not really motivated to paint that one. I think the drider would be more relaxing than these goblins!
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Post by Thorn on May 15, 2019 0:23:17 GMT -5
Today I painted the rest of the wooden parts, and then did the fur as well. I'd been planning to do more painting later in the day but didn't get time (winter=gets dark early!), so I didn't get pictures of the fur. Instead I just have some pictures of Archer Goblin next to one of my d20s (the standard 20mm) for scale. (...which would have worked better if it was next to the goblin instead of behind. Nice one, Thorn!) I painted the bow and the shaft of the arrow. It's the same paint I used for the shield on the other goblin, but today it decided to look Actually Gold for some reason (it's supposed to be gold paint, but it went more brown yesterday.) Go figure. (You can see here that the bow looks very gold, as opposed to the brown I was going for.) (ft. my fancy Pusheen sticker.) I'll be a Sensible Person now and not post again until these are completed- but Shield Goblin should be finished tomorrow at least, just need to touch up a few points and paint the feet.
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Post by Thorn on May 15, 2019 23:13:16 GMT -5
Shield Goblin is finito!!! My camera was playing up again so my brother took a couple of pictures, ft. the junk mail I was painting the goblins on. I don't plan on doing more painting today, so I'll finish the others another time! One of them has a tricky necklace/amulet design on its chest I don't have the patience for right now. Bit of a face blur on this one- have they been accused of speeding in the dungeon and their face is blurred while they appear on Highway Patrol? Who knows! I had two options when it came to gluing this figure to the base. One had about a billion warning labels, I sensibly went for the other. This critter's really desperate to be in the Bed, Bath and Beyond catalogue, it seems! (yes that's a stack of d&d manuals at the back left.) This one is the best photo: This dude liftssssss. You also get a nice look at the furry boots and arm...thing. There's a bit of white I couldn't quite get rid of in the ponytail, but oh well! I think we need an even finer brush haha. When I get a job I may acquire one for us.
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Post by Killix on May 16, 2019 3:15:20 GMT -5
Nicely painted! I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to get details on something that ridiculously tiny. XD
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Post by Thorn on May 16, 2019 5:28:24 GMT -5
Aww thanks! This is my very first mini so that's really nice to hear. =D And I did find it a bit tricky- part of the reason I called it quits early today was that my hands were seizing up from being half-closed for so long, as well as starting to shake more, haha.
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Post by Thorn on May 17, 2019 23:22:37 GMT -5
Bow-Goblin and Axe-Goblin just need small touch-ups and to be attached to their bases! Since I had a lot of leftover grey-and-black sitting around anyway after painting their leg wraps and skirt-bit, I decided to start on this drider! With my brother's permission, of course- he said he's happy for me to paint it, he did part of the carapace months ago and hadn't touched it since. The drider is by Reaper (from the Reaper Bones line), whereas the goblins are by WizKids (Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures.) The latter has more detail, but also an unfortunate tendency for random air-bubbles and extra bits of material to leave marks on the figures. The former line doesn't seem to have those issues, based on the admittedly small sample size in this house, but the figures are less detailed. Driders are one of my fave d&d monsters, both in lore-terms and in terms of sheer visual coolness (spider centaurs!!!!), so that makes it even more enjoyable to work on. Ramblings on the above:Goblins: the black straps across Bow-Goblin's chest should be raised, not set back into the figure. It makes it look very weird up close! I was also feeling daring and tried to put some black paint into the eye sockets to give that same goblin something resembling eyes, to little success. Axe-Goblin has a sort of rope belt which was tricky to paint, and I'm very happy with how it turned out! EDIT for future eye painting: my friend said it looks best if you base coat the face white, and then just outline the eyes in a similar tone to their skin colour.
Drider: This figure splits in half, so I could work on one section and then let that dry while working on the other. I first painted the last segment on each leg to make them stand out, then let that dry and painted the humanoid/drow half. For some reason I decided to start with a dark colour, so spent most of the time trying not to get this dark grey pigment on the hair. I think I did okay, there's just one grey streak I can see and it's very small!
Painting the carapace and legs was pretty calming because it's just...it's just black paint, it's hard to get it wrong, I didn't have to pay too much attention. I haven't painted the underside though, or the sword and shield on the top half (or the hair, if I decide to do that), so will go back and do that stuff another time. As suggested, I've been resting my brush-hand pinky against my other hand when painting. It took me a while to get the hang of how exactly to hold everything while doing that, but I think that's sorted now and it does seem to help! I can get right into small places with the brush (like the underside of Axe-Goblin's pauldron and the part of the drider's arm which has the shield hooked over it) without paint going everywhere it shouldn't!
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Post by Thorn on May 20, 2019 19:00:43 GMT -5
Today is a beautiful day! And what do we do with beautiful days? We throw our projects into the sunlight and take pictures! I think in general the sun made these pictures better, even if aspects of the figures are obscured by glare. The goblins are finished! This was taken shortly before I attached them to their bases and they will be handed back to my brother to throw into his Box of Minions, likely never to be seen again. I'm going to paint around the drider's eyes with a smaller brush, actually paint its hair, do the handle-bit on the shield in a different colour, and fix its face a bit. I'm ordering two minis today and will be swapping a hand from one to the other. My friend who does this all the time (better known from my ramblings as Tsuki/Aurora/River's rper) has talked me through it, and I'm nervous, but the hands are in similar positions and both minis are elves from the same line, so I've made it as easy as I can for myself, I think. (I'm watching 'Escape from the Bloodkeep' as I type and oh man this is THE BEST thing?? I was laughing the whole time the spirits sucked up to Murderdeath.)
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Post by Thorn on May 20, 2019 21:17:35 GMT -5
I mixed 'ceramic white' and 'shining gold' to paint the drider's hair. Being a drider is like, The Worst, so I can at least give the poor mini some nice hair! Also the colour scheme was just so much black and grey that I wanted something bright and shiny to take away from that. After that coat dried, I went back with a thin brush and painted 'shining gold' into the grooves representing the underlayers (or w/ever you call it, I'm not a hairdresser), and over where the roots would be. I think it looks very nice!
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Post by Thorn on May 21, 2019 22:41:07 GMT -5
Finished the spooder! Am quite happy with how the arm-bit on the shield turned out! I've glued the two halves of the drider together but although there's a hole underneath this mini, it didn't come with a base, so it's just gonna chill like this. (gonna put this one on our display shelf)
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Post by Thorn on May 22, 2019 18:30:57 GMT -5
"I wonder if my minis are here???" I thought, wandering downstairs to glance atop the old washing machine, traditional dumping ground of lazy courier drivers to our locale. And yay, they were! These are the pre-primed ones which, for a total n00b painter, are awesome! And these were ten New Zealand dollars each, which is about five pounds- five pounds for a pack of two minis is pretty awesome! Anyway, I immediately put two of the minis and their stands away in my Mini Box of Doom, and got to work taking way too many photos of the ones I wanted to use for my Not At All Secret Project... Look at the sorcerer's wonderful pose! The fighter is the main mini, I'm just taking the sorcerer's spellcasting hand. I was really happy to realise that the spell conceals the hand to some degree, so I don't have to worry about this arm looking weird or longer than the other because it will anyway! The bow is so beautiful. <3 Two more of the 'elf fighter' miniature. Another lessgood angle as well. So for those few who are reading this and somehow don't know, in spite of my poorly controlled rambling: I hold two of my d&d characters particularly close to my heart. Ursh was my first character, so they're getting a special fancy HeroForge mini (which I will never paint because I would RUIN ITTTTTT.) Zazz isn't, though, because these things are expensive and he's not even a character I get to play with any real regularity. I decided to make a tiny Zazz out of Wizkids minis so I at least have something, and also as a test-run for when I possibly have to cut/reattach bits on my upcoming long-term aasimar paladin's mini. I chose the elf fighter as the base because the hair is very nice and wavy (if a bit short), the bow is super cool, and I can definitely work with this armour. But he can't and would never chase somebody down with an axe, so I needed to switch that to either a casting hand, or a rapier or dagger. MightyApe didn't seem to have minis with compatible rapiers or daggers, so casting hand it is! Our craft knife was a little blunt, so I used nail clippers to tidy up the break. You can see the shape of the hand in the above image- it attached at the perfect angle! Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be very strongly attached, so hopefully either the glue just takes a while to strengthen, or I can at the very least reattach it more securely. Not a great angle on the rest of the mini, but just look how nicely the breaks lined up and how smoothly the hand is attached! Ahhhhh!
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Post by Thorn on May 24, 2019 23:35:31 GMT -5
The grey I used on the drider pools...weirdly, which I already sort of knew so should have anticipated. Anyway, you can see it caused Some Problems when you examine the mini's hand in the below picture. (I've only painted one side of the figure so far.) And below, when I went over the 'medium sea grey' with uhhhh....I forget the name. A slightly lighter grey. It looks a lot better now, although of course there are still spots to touch up later! You may notice the casting-hand fell off...again...I wasn't paying attention when holding the mini to paint and put too much pressure on it DANGIT. But I took the opportunity to paint the cuff gold and start some work on the flame. The cuff on the still-attached hand needs to be re-golded (the other probably will too, it's not a very strong colour), and I need to touch up the bow and the hair and like...everything, but this is my progress so far!
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Post by Thorn on May 25, 2019 18:28:58 GMT -5
Going to visit my grandmother today and then hanging out with friends, so I did a little bit of painting this morning and that will be it. Reattached the hand last night and it feels pretty sturdy! I really like how the fire looks and tried to capture that, it's a translucent blue right now (I still think I want to add another colour too...) with sparkly specks of gold! (ignore the white patch on the face...grey marks on the hair...I'll do what I can with those soonish! I included a standard 20mm d20 for scale. This d20 gave me three nat 20s last session I used it! The first time I actually shrieked, because I am An Annoying; and according to the others in the Skype call this was picked up by my brother's mic on the other side of the room.) Everything below is tinted blue but you can see a lil flash of gold in the spell-fire, which is the main thing! I love shiny things and am so happy the speckles turned out looking Not Terrible.
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Post by Thorn on May 26, 2019 21:35:19 GMT -5
Right! This 'elf fighter' mini has been roughly painted, minus the boots. I will do the boots...at some stage...really nervous to do that part! And then I'll go back and tidy up the rest. The whole outfit should be black, but I wanted it to look more interesting, so I used dark purple for the bottom half (besides, this character likes lots of colour, so it still makes sense!) I also added some flecks of purple to the fire, finished off the black portion of the outfit, and touched up the face. (just realised I haven't done the shafts of the arrows- I'll do that this afternoon. I think I'll also do another coat of translucent blue on the flames since it's very, very pale.) Haven't taken a photo from the back for a while- will do that when I'm finished, at least.
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